Filmmaker Jeff Prosserman takes on the narrative of Bernie Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos and his long, surprisingly fruitless, struggle to bring Madoff to justice. Though chasing money is nowhere near as interesting as true love or any other noble endeavour, Prosserman finds a decent door into the numbers by attaching the story to one man with a good heart, and a brain fast enough to catch the financial sleight of hand.

A documentary by Jeff Prosserman

Rating: Three stars out of five

We live in a world that appears to respect money more than love, which may well be the most interesting chunk of subtext in Jeff Prosserman's documentary about infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

A forensic-style investigation that begins all the way back in 2000, when a market analyst named Harry Markopolos looked at a Madoff document and concluded it was a fraud in all of five minutes, Chasing Madoff tells the surprisingly long story of what remains the biggest scam on Wall Street.

Bernard Madoff bilked private individuals and international institutions out of billions and billions of dollars. The depth and complexity of the crime is staggering, but it's not the details of Madoff's defrauding that really make this movie as disturbing as it is.

There will always be bad apples, after all, and as long as they are limited in number and remain the minority, there is a sense of justice and balance in the larger world order we can all hang on to.

Markopolos really believed in doing the right thing, which is why he and two colleagues started to dig into Madoff's deal-making. They spent days crunching numbers and kept coming to the same conclusion: This can't be real.

Markopolos said that just looking at the rate of returns in graphic form was enough to twig any money expert's suspicions, because the line moved upward at a straight 45-degree angle.

"That's impossible. The markets go up and down," says Markopolos.

If Madoff were a baseball player, according to his stats, he'd be batting .964, a practical impossibility in the human world of sport, and the equally human -- if largely soulless -- world of international finance.

Within the first 10 minutes of this high-gloss non-fiction reel, the core drama is already established: This isn't the story of Madoff and his debauched approach to business; it's the story of Markopolos's long odyssey to justice.

After finding endless proofs of Madoff's fiduciary irresponsibility, the former military man felt he needed to guard his country against "all enemies, foreign and domestic" and sent damning documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory body responsible for Wall Street.

Feeling he'd given the SEC a smoking gun with Madoff fingerprints, Markopolos figured Madoff would be indicted within days. But nothing happened.

The SEC refused to act. For close to 10 years, the only government body capable of putting an end to Madoff's criminal undertaking was suspiciously silent.

The movie tries to creep into these regulatory cracks. It provides endlessly suggestive footage of SEC regulators before a federal committee looking stunned, surprised and shamefaced, as they admit to having social relationships with Madoff and his family.

In short order, the whole thing starts to look like a massive coverup, with connections that run so high up the ladder of power, you can't even see the top players through the clouds.

This movie clearly gets Madoff in the end, but it never pulls those top dogs out of their throne and drags them back to earth. We hear talking heads suggest that maybe, perhaps, there was someone in a top office ensuring no bad news about Bernie made it to print.

They can't prove anything, and clearly, they were trying.

What this movie does rub up against with glaring results is the importance the American citizen puts on private wealth. In addition to interviewing the top financial forces on Wall Street, the cameras also capture the ordinary people who got roped into Madoff's corral of corruption.

These people are so broken and so bereft, it's like someone died. For the male subjects, the sense of violation can only be compared to rape: They are quite simply humiliated and emotionally castrated.

It's touching, at one level, to see people so hurt. And yet, the tragedy is all money -- and grieving white-collar crime is a tough proposition.

Prosserman seems to get that, so he positions the whole drama on Markopolos' shoulders as the force of good: a man who believes in love and family, and who is ready to risk it all to see the right thing happen.

"I can always get another job," says Markopolos. "But I have to live with myself."

Clearly, there are too few people like Markopolos out there. But by showing us one man with a strong moral compass, Chasing Madoff finds surprising potency and proves inspiring enough to fight the power.

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